Tag Archives: Literature

I’m very much looking to speaking at the symposium Texts in Place/ Place in Texts at Royal Holloway on 21st May 2015, which brings together geographers and literary scholars to discuss their understandings of the relationship between texts and places.

My talk is titled “’The distance is quite imaginary’: locating the nation and the world in Dickens’s David Copperfield” and is drawn from a section of my forthcoming monograph which explores the representation of national and global spaces/places in the Victorian novel. Full abstract as follows:

“It is merely crossing,” said Mr. Micawber, trifling with his eye-glass, “merely crossing. The distance is quite imaginary.”

Mr Micawber’s humorous denial of the distance between Britain and Australia provides a comic strain to the emigration story of Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849–50), but its comedy belies an important point about the representation of place, and especially the national-global politics of representation, in the Victorian novel. In this paper, I will use David Copperfield to think about the representation of place in terms of narrative structure: how much narrative space is afforded to different places, how places are made more or less present through various representational modes, and how structures of nation and world intersect. I will suggest that David Copperfieldprovides an exemplary model of the structural delineation of place in the Victorian novel: a tight yet protracted core of the nation-space is set against an absent, often “imaginary”, world at large. Yet David Copperfield also calls for a closer reading of this structure, and I identify a paralleling of national and global places in the narrative to suggest how we might read for more subtle inferences of global resonances in the spaces of the Victorian novel.

Shakespeare on the Global Stage: Performance and Festivity in the Olympic Year, edited by Paul Prescott and Erin Sullivan, has just been published by Bloomsbury’s Arden Shakespeare series. The collection takes a range of perspectives on Shakespearean performance in 2012, emerging from the Year of Shakespeare project on the World Shakespeare Festival. I am pleased to have contributed a co-written essay, with Dr Peter Kirwan (Uni. of Nottingham) on “A Tale of Two Londons: Locating Shakespeare and Dickens in 2012”, which parallels the Shakespeare Festival and the Dickens bicentenary to explore the cultural politics of locating authors within national literary landscapes, and how this plays out within an international cultural context.

On Friday 11th July 2014 the IAS Travel and Mobility Studies Research Network held its second annual conference, “Travelling between the Centre and Periphery: Creating a Feminist Dialogue for the Diaspora”. With the aim of developing discussions of diasporic writing and the centre-periphery framework through a focus on feminism in travel narratives, the one-day event included a keynote presentation by the acclaimed Professor Miriam Cooke (Duke University) as well as ten presentations by academics working on contemporary and postcolonial literary studies, migration studies, history of art and contemporary art theory. The day produced rich and interesting discussions on centre-periphery frameworks, theories of the diaspora, transnationalism, mobility and gender, generating a diverse set of feminist perspectives on these themes.

The day commenced with Professor miriam cooke’s keynote on “Women and the Arab Spring”. miriam cooke provided an overview of the role of women during and after the Arab Spring. She argued that Arab women have a century-long history of participating in their countries’ revolutions, irrespective of attempts to remove them from the public sphere. She provided examples of women who have been forced into exile, and thus continue their activism using social media.

The first panel of the day, “Bodies and Flight”, provided three perspectives on the intersections between gender, mobility and diasporic theories. Lindsey Moore discussed Camilla Gibb’s Sweetness in the Belly (2005) to open up wider questions of female identity formation and travel; exploring issues around the representation of religion and spirituality, literacy and reading, and different spaces, Moore ended by suggesting that the text reiterates travelling across boundaries as productive to the identity of the female traveller. Max Andrucki and Jen Dickinson’s paper argued that while economic models are typically privileged in discussions of the centre-periphery framework, a more diverse and mobile concept of centrality and marginality might be posited as a productive theoretical model; two case studies of migrant experiences demonstrated how a ‘performative’ idea of the diaspora could be conceptualised. Anna Ball looked to challenge centre-periphery frameworks through an exploration of bodies in flight, reading three cinematic works that portray Afghan women’s flight to propose the concept of a ‘mobile periphery’.

In “Transnational Travel Narratives”, Ester Gendusa offered a reading of Bernardine Evaristo’s Soul Tourists (2005) that raised questions of identity and belonging, suggesting that diasporic belonging can be perceived as an issue of self-identification with particular groups, communities or identities. Maryam Ala Amjadi’s paper explored gender and mobility in the Safavid world, analysing the writing of a female traveller who travelled from Persia to Mecca in the late seventeenth century. Demystifying the figure of the Safavid female traveller, Amjadi drew links with contemporary representations of Persian/ Iranian women and explored the historical implications of these ideas.

Panel C on “Feminism and the Diaspora” endeavoured to examine the impact migration has on women. Latefa Narriman Guemar shared her research into highly skilled Algerian women who emigrated during the 1990s. Dr Enaya Othman focused on Palestinian immigrant women and the meaning ascribed to their choice of dress, which is often used to demonstrate belonging and affiliation.

In the final panel on “the Diaspora in Visual Arts” both papers explored the feminine visual diaspora; art reflecting interactions with place and the effects of diasporic movement. Kuang Sheng began the panel by showcasing the artworks of a Chinese female artist Yin Xiuzhen who creates ‘Portable Cities’, unfolded suitcases full of manipulated second hand clothes designed to emulate different geographical places. Dr Maria Luisa Coelho focuses on the Portuguese female artist Maria Lusitano who tries to recreate the experience of being torn between home and abroad through her autobiographical visual work.

The organisers would like to thank the Humanities Research Centre, Institute of Advanced Study, Faculty of Arts and Connecting Cultures Global Research Priority for their support.

I spent Friday 11th October in Stratford-upon-Avon at the launch of Shakespeare on the Road, a project between the University of Warwick, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and Misfits, inc. to celebrate the 2014-16 anniversaries of Shakespeare’s birth and death. In what sounds like a rather wonderful (and enviable!) summer, the team are travelling across the United States visiting around 17 Shakespeare Festivals to provide an account of the as-yet-undocumented ways in which Shakespeare is performed, experienced and interpreted in US Festival settings.

This symposium marked the launch of the project and was an opportunity to discuss some of the initial questions proposed by and arising from the project. Throughout the day we heard a fascinating range of papers about different aspects of Shakespeare and/in the USA: Nicola Watson spoke about Shakespeare Gardens in the US as sites of memorial and commemoration that cultivate a particularly “English”, and feminised, space; Andrew Dickson talked about Shakespeare’s presence in the history of the American West – place-names, accounts of reading on the road – a theme picked up on later in Tim Lockley‘s paper on the appropriation of Shakespeare in the colonial period as a legacy of “Englishness”.

There’s also the long history of American interest in the Birthplace, including the (perhaps mythical) story of the American showman P.T. Barnum who, so it is said, tried to purchase the Birthplace in 1847 with the intention of shipping it to the USA where it would become part of his travelling circus (more on that here) – a point I picked up on at the end of my paper on the interconnections between literature, nation and place to pose the question: what if Barnum had been successful and transported the Birthplace away from Stratford-upon-Avon – so that it became, in the words of Dickens’s Wemmick, ‘portable property’? What might this lead us to ask about the location of national culture – is it in the walls of the house, the ground on which it stands, the national audience that experiences it, all of those things together; can national culture be detached from national place and still have meaning, and what alternative perspectives might new national contexts have generated?

Ideas of place were central to Stuart Elden’s paper on Shakespeare’s territories which, following on from his new book The Birth of Territory, began to explore the ways in which territory is used and understood in Shakespeare’s plays. Steve Purcell also raised questions about the appropriation of space in festival contexts, where the carnivalisation of outdoor spaces often plays a central role in crafting ideas and expectations around Shakespeare Festivals and Ruth Leary spoke about festivals from a cultural policy perspective, and posed interesting ideas about the idea of creative economy and cultural entrepreneurship today and in Shakespeare’s own activity.

I was pleased to have the opportunity to participate in such an enjoyable day generating some stimulating research questions, and it’ll be fascinating to see how the project develops over the next couple of years.

The Feminist and Women’s Studies Association blog recently started an exciting series on historical groundbreaking women, showcasing the life and work of some fascinating and lesser-known figures, and I’m very pleased to have contributed a post on George Eliot. Although Eliot is well known, I’ve tried to offer some thoughts on the complexities of her ‘groundbreaking’ life and work, and to draw out some smaller examples from her fiction that might not be so widely recognised.

And if you haven’t done so already, do go and check out the rest of the series, and indeed the whole blog which is full of excellent feminist content!

The latest issue of Victorian Network, “Sex, Courtship and Marriage in Victorian Literature and Culture”, is now available. I had the pleasure of guest editing this issue, which was a fantastic job due to both the excellent contributors and editorial board involved. The issue features essays that cover a myriad of themes on sexuality and marriage: fallen women in Gaskell, sexual risk and theatrical performance, masculinity and marital rape in Trollope, ageing and sexual selection in Haggard, pederasty in Wilde, and concealed eroticism in Eliot. My introduction to the issue discusses George Eliot’s Adam Bede and surveys the critical field on sexuality and marriage in Victorian studies.

I hope you enjoy reading the issue as much as I enjoyed putting it together!

Yes, it really has been one year today since the start of the bicentenary of Charles Dickens – and no, I’m not about to suggest that we start another year of celebrations… I did want to take the opportunity to reflect, though, on some of the issues that have been raised over the last year, both in the content of the celebrations themselves and in the wider context of the year as a whole.

As has been clear in my previous Dickens 2012 posts, one element that has particularly interested me is the emphasis on Dickens and place, and especially Dickens and London, that has been present in many of the bicentenary activities: a whole host of different ways of connecting Dickens and London, from tours that root (/route) Dickens firmly in the material landscape of the city, to digital media forms that offer truly mobile yet completely dis/non-placed experiences of “Dickens’s London” across the globe. I’m really interested in thinking further about the what and why of these forms, particularly in terms of issues around nation that I’ve raised before, but also with regards to ideas of impact: why this emphasis on place and what does it tell us about the types of cultural activities that we value? What impact has this had on the public understanding of Dickens?

There are wider questions too about the impact of Dickens 2012 and how this has shaped the cultural imagination of Dickens. Was it too much and are we all just suffering from Dickens fatigue now? Is there the possibility that Dickens overkill has had a negative or detrimental effect? And at what cost the over-investment in Dickens 2012? Dickens didn’t need putting on the map, and a whole host of other writers have been dwarfed in his shadow this year, not least those whose bicentenaries also marked significant moments for Victorian studies.

But there is one thing that I think Dickens 2012 offers to scholars of other writers, and that’s a legacy of how we “do” bicentenaries. Dickens 2012 has been marked not just be quantity, but also by the quality and sheer variety of forms through which we’ve been able to engage with Dickens’s life and works: a whole host of innovative, engaging and insightful documentaries, podcasts, lectures, talks, digital media, mobile apps, maps, have really expanded the possibilities – and I think there’s something about the collective proliferation of the focus on Dickens that has been particularly interesting and indicative. It’s not just public engagement either, and within academia we’ve seen discussions of research take on exciting new forms, from the 4-day travelling conference that gestured towards the internationalism of Dickens’s works and Dickens scholarship, to the Dickens’s World online conference that went a step further in enabling a truly global discourse of Dickens to emerge. We can but take from this the potential and possibility for other writers too, and use Dickens 2012 as a model for future bicentenaries.

I think, too, Dickens 2012 has opened up the potential for new lines of inquiry between critical and cultural debate: the year has provided a wealth of material for thinking about “the idea of Dickens” as a collective form. As I’ve gestured towards in this and other blog posts, and am seeking to do in my new research, Dickens 2012 has shown how public engagement is not just useful for the communication of research but might also be taken as an indicative source of analysis – and not just at its most obvious level in terms of reading contemporary culture, but also by using this understanding of our own times to open up new ways of interrogating facets of the Victorian period.

A year ago I posed the question “so now what?” After Dickens 2012, what’s next; Bronte 2016? Dickens 2012 has continued to open up more questions than answers, but I think it is clear that the time is now to start reflecting on what the year has given us, what ideas it has produced and developed, as well as to seize new possibilities for the future celebrations of other authors. At 201 Dickens might feel like especially well-trodden ground, but the space remains for mapping new movements and forging new directions in our interactions with the Victorian past.